Often our cultural paradigms for fidelity and sexual propriety are, frankly, seemingly low-testosterone, low-sociosexuality cases. Of course Mr. Rogers is going to be faithful to his wife (although I don’t claim any knowledge of his T-count). Or all those skinny Mr. Darcy-type, regency period love interests that Mormon women are obsessed with (another post for another day). 

This isn’t bad necessarily, I’m not shaming low-T men, nor am I conflating manly strength with traditionally masculine traits, but there’s a limit to the extent to which a Mr. Rogers type can serve as an example on sexual issues or speak to men and young men who are not so inclined. And as a father of boys I want to be able to draw on examples of manly men who aren’t just faithful because they’re demisexual, gray-asexual, or sometimes just plain asexual (again, nothing wrong with that), but men for whom their faithfulness and respect for women is an extension of, and not simply in spite of, their traditional masculinity (and no, not all traditional masculinity is toxic, although some is). 

Since for many male adolescents sex is the driving issue of their existence, how exactly it is channeled and normatively framed is huge, less they become a Andrew Tate or yet another 35-year old masturbating in their mother’s basement. So my antenna is constantly on about what kind of pro-chastity messages I can feed into their media diet in a non-ham-fisted, non-preachy way. Of course there’s no problem with preaching occasionally, but ideally it would be great to pair explicit gospel messages with the kind of social media influences that say the same thing, like that book about how to sneak vegetables into your kids’ food. 

So on that note, below is my list of potentially useful examples of high-testosterone, masculine fidelity in the popular media. 

Maximus in Gladiator

This is the “S-tier” example. It’s hard to get more masculine than Maximus. His passion for his wife is supplemented, not detracted, but his masculine aggression when his desire for making right the death of his wife translates into winning in the arena. Also, a very tear-jerky ending scene that should have a particular appeal to us with our afterlife theology. 

John Wick

John Wick is a similar situation, although sometimes with him there is destruction for destruction’s sake…which can be fun sometimes. The sap here is a little over-the-top, but massacring the people who killed the dog your decreased wife sent you is pretty, base? Dope? (Is that what the kids say these days?). The violence is also a little over-the-top (I mean, it’s John Wick), but the animating force here is his devotion to his wife, not vengeance or just shooting people to be cool like it is for a lot of other movies. 

The Godfather

The scene I’m thinking of in particular here was when Michael Corleone arrives at Las Vegas and his brother Moe offers him a bevy of women to enjoy before their meeting, and he very coolly shrugs them off so they can get down to business. I’m not a James Bond fan, but it seems like for some of the more recent iterations the writers tried to go in this direction, where Bond is simply above using sex to fulfill his own carnal desires when there are bigger issues at play. I don’t know if the Bond franchise kept going in that direction, but it’s the same vibe as Michael Corleone. 

The Northman

Okay, this one is going to get me in trouble, but let me explain. The Northman is clearly an anti-hero with all sorts of toxic masculinist traits that I do not want for my sons, but he also isn’t a one-dimensional evil character. Let’s say the film doesn’t take late-stage, post-Christian morality as its taken-for-granted background framework, and in including him on this list I’m not endorsing most of what he does in the movie, but if we could figure out how to capture the sense of kinship; family obligations to spouse, ancestors, and descendents; willingness to fight and die for family, and “turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers,” without burning Ukrainian villages and enslaving people that would be great. (Of course, it would have been better had he stayed and helped raise the kids instead of pursuing a blood vendetta).  

Pulp Fiction

I’m also not going to win any father-of-the-year awards for watching Pulp Fiction with my kids, although Vidangel helps. The scene I’m thinking of here is when Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character exclaims (right before shooting somebody of course) “Mr. Wallace doesn’t want to [edit, edit] anybody but Mrs. Wallace!” And yes, I know a comical aside by a gangster shouldn’t be read into too seriously like it has some profound meaning, but still, the fact that Marcell Wallace’s spousal relationship with the Uma Thurman character is sort of taken for granted throughout the movie is meaningful when the operating assumption with gangster types, like in The Godfather, is that they have all these side options, so the idea of a traditionally monogamous marriage doesn’t quite fit. 

300

Leonidas throws the Persian emissaries into a pit for, among other things, insulting his queen, and looks to her for permission before doing so. He relies on her heavily for advice on how to handle the impending invasion. Here the hyper-masculinity goes hand-in-hand with a matriarch-as-equal-partner rather than an aggressive man simply dominating his wife. The hyper-masculinity is an extension of respect for their wife’s authority, and not something to dominate her with. [CW: There is a little bit of homonegativity, but since he talks about “boy lovers” I’m going to interpret that as pederasty and not homosexuality per se. Plus the actual Spartans were very bisexual, and didn’t see non-receptive homosexual sex as being sissy in any way.]